Sashwee had a question for Mr. Stossel after yesterday’s post.
Would Mr. Stossel, I wonder, be willing to recommend some starter music
for a baby? Stimulating but not too stimulating if you know what I mean?
Sashwee, I tried to reach him but he can be hard to pin down for questioning. (I guess he prefers to be on the left side of the question mark.)
I’m seeing a lot of visitors today from the link in ClubMom’s Preschoolers newsletter. Welcome! We’re pretty much in perpetual preschool mode around here, no matter what else is going on.
Here is our current three-and-a-half-year-old. He’s an adventure! You can read more about him here.
He is surrounded by sisters: three above, one below. (The day he was born, when I called my mom from the hospital to tell her to give my girls the news that they had a brother, I heard an audible gasp in the background, and then Rose, then six years old, shouted, "He can be the KING!" She’d been in need of a boy to round out the make-believe casting pool. Thus was his position firmly established from the beginning. Although these days, his antics are so hilarious he’s more like the court jester. Young Rilla, our 18-month-old, has usurped the throne for now.)
Here are some posts about Early Childhood Education. And I’ve written lots of picture book reviews at my author site, Here in the Bonny Glen. Enjoy!
UPDATED TO ADD this link: Preschoolers and Proper Pencil Grip. It wasn’t properly labeled before, sorry!
A year ago today we left Virginia. That morning, I woke up early and wrote a post about the going-away present our backyard had given us.
Yesterday, the friends we left behind gave us that present all over again.
Oh, Blue Ridge friends and butterflies! How we miss you!
And part of it is the way the kids’ minds work, and how I marvel at it. Rose mentioned that she likes to listen to "music without words" when she is reading or painting. "You know the kind," she said, "sort of soft and dangerous."
Soft and dangerous. I kept turning the phrase over in my mind. It’s perfect; I know just what she means. I iChatted Scott, our music guru, to ask for CD suggestions. He fired back a list. (Or rather, John Stossel did. Don’t ask me why, but that’s my husband’s current IM avatar. I think I liked last week’s pirate hamster icon better.)
First I had to laugh for about ten minutes because John Stossel knows there is no way in tarnation I would voluntarily listen to Brian Eno. I know, musical genius and all that, but ambient music makes the fillings want to leap out of my teeth, and my eardrums shiver like aspen leaves.
When I finally stopped howling, I found the Shostakovich and put in on. This was at lunchtime; the girls were just sitting down to sandwiches. Rose listened to the opening notes of the symphony and said, "Yeah. That’s just what I meant."
"I know what she means by ‘soft and dangerous,’ Mom," mused Jane. "To put it in math terms, I’d call it XYZ music. You know—it’s about variables."
"Signing Time!" yelled Wonderboy.
"Do you like my mustache?" purred John Stossel.
I couldn’t answer. I was busy pouring milk for children who are soft, dangerous, and variable.